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Article Excerpt
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the world's most celebrated playwrights. With such plays as Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Caesar and Cleopatra, Arms and the Man, Saint Joan, Mrs. Warren's Profession, Heartbreak House, Candida, The Doctor's Dilemma, The Devil's Disciple, Back to Methuselah, and Pygmalion (made into the movie My Fair Lady), the expatriate Irishman forged a grand repertoire in English second only to Shakespeare's. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923, long after his days as a struggling artist, Shaw refused the [pounds sterling]7000 prize, commenting that "the money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." At his behest, the money was given to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Alliance.
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In his waning years, he became an international icon. In George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, Hesketh Pearson describes the adulation: "Whatever he said or did was treated with respect, tinged with awe. When he clowned people laughed dutifully, when he cut a caper they applauded reverentially. Every word he uttered was cabled across several continents. Every nonsensical joke he made was gratefully accepted as the garnered wisdom of a profound thinker." Though Shaw was prone to bouts of megalomania, he viewed his apotheosis with amused detachment. "I am the most extraordinary man in London," he informed writer Ernest Rhys, "and you are quite welcome to give this fact on my authority."
Shaw was an indefatigable crusader for social amelioration. At a time when the English stage trafficked in romantic fripperies, he awakened complacent audiences to a host of social ills abetted by conventional morality, bourgeois respectability, and ossified institutions. "I was a social reformer and doctrinaire first, last, and all the time," he wrote. "I saw a way through the Valley of the Shadow and believed that when men understood their predicament they could and would escape from it." Enlivening didacticism with mordant wit, he dissected slum landlordism, prostitution, marriage, free love, politics, militarism, nationalism, jingoism, capitalism, evangelism, and other isms steeped in hypocrisy, cant, and deceit.
He was a lifelong socialist, vegetarian, and pacifist. His first public speech, made in 1885 before the Industrial Remuneration Conference in London, scorched capitalism. The speech opened: "I hope any shareholders and landlords who may be present will accept my assurance that I have no more desire to hurt their feelings than to give pain to burglars. I merely wish to point out that all three inflict on the community an injury of precisely the same nature." As a leading pundit for the Fabian Society, Shaw was instrumental in the formation of the Labor Party, which assimilated the genteel form of Marxism espoused by Fabians.
His vegetarianism was actuated by an egalitarian view of species and concern for humanity. He envisioned a cortege of animals paying him posthumous homage: "My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed not by mourning coaches, but by herds of oxen, sheep, swine, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow-creatures. It will be, with the exception of the procession into Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of the kind ever seen." A carnivorous lifestyle, he believed, coarsened sensibilities, squandered natural resources, and debased workers in the meat industry....
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